This week, i ♥ faces is celebrating Independence Day by taking a week off and instead we are invited to share our patriotic stories. Coincidentally, I was planning to share our pictures from the 4th for my Sunday Suppers post this week, so I decided to just combine the 2 into one giant post. My pictures aren't fantastic, but we did have a lot of fun! I'll lead off with the food, of course!

Lucas outdid himself at the grill this year with these bacon wrapped steaks and grilled corn on the cob. They were amazing! We also had giant sweet potatoes with whipped honey butter, but they somehow managed to elude my camera...

Lincoln also dined on sweet potato (sans honey butter).

I'm a firm believer that the 4th of July and pie go hand in hand, so of course there was pie. This year, I went with strawberry-rhubarb. YUM. This beats last year's peach-raspberry, hands down. There were also Cherry Limeade cupcakes, but you'll have to come back for Tutorial Tuesday tomorrow to read about those!

Once again, here is Lincoln in the mei-tai with food in his hair (flour from the baking experience). I'm posting this to point out that this time it wasn't me getting food in the baby's hair! That would be Lucas this time. We share the fun.

After dinner, Lincoln went down for a nap so that he'd be able to stay up to watch the fireworks with us. We found a great place to view the fireworks that go off near the Boardwalk by our house that wasn't crowded at all! And, it was far enough away that Lincoln wasn't scared by the BOOMS!

Lucas will be displeased that I am posting this picture of him. He is making quite an interesting face here. But, I wanted to show you Lincoln's expression--a little concern, mixed with fear, mixed with wide-eyed awe at the huge lights in the sky. So funny!

Lincoln taking a break from watching the sky to look back at the camera.

Fireworks!

Father-son firework bonding time.

And, to make up for posting that picture of Lucas above, here is a shot of my awesome husband spending the last day of his 3 day weekend fixing the water line to our house. We woke up yesterday morning to the sound of our doorbell ringing at 6:30 and were greeted by a neighbor telling us that water was bubbling up on the side of our house and had flooded the yard and was now forming a river flowing down our cul-de-sac. Awesome. So, Lucas had to dig a hole in the "mud" (a more apt word here would be modeling clay), find the crack in the pipe, cut the pipe, and splice in new PVC pipe to fix the leak, all in the 90 plus degree Texas heat. Fun times! Yay for Lucas! We were so glad he was able to fix it so we didn't have to call a plumber on a weekend (a HOLIDAY weekend, no less!). So, thank you, wonderful husband! You can now add plumber to your excellent home repair credentials : )

The problem revealed:

All better! Just have to reconnect the line to the house.

The pile of clay. Gross.

I hope everyone had a wonderful and repair-free Independence Day! Check out more patriotic stories over at i ♥ faces!

We had the same thing happen to us with the water line, right after we moved in when family was visiting. We spliced it in a flooded yard just to find out 4 months later that the old homeowners had spliced the piping one to many times and we had to replace the whole darn thing. Jeremy like lucas did it himself. Hopefully for you guys you don't have to mess with it again.